Fonts, too many?
 

Greetings:

I have not had too much luck getting a definitive answer on this so I pose the question here.

How many TTF/OTF fonts installed is too many??

If it is a problem, does it matter if they are in /usr/share/fonts/ or ~?

I am thinking it is not much of a problem in Slackware unlike M$. I know in M$, too many fonts will slow down your boot up process.

Am I wrong? Any suggestions?

Whether it can/will slow things down is unknown - I've never installed a huge number of fonts.
I doubt you'd see much of an impact, but who knows...

Thanks Robby, I currently have 257 installed now and don't see any problem from a fresh install reboot to what I have now. I was looking at adding about another 40 or so for some graphics I want to make.

I have around 100 or so, and probably it won't show signs of slowing until you get into the thousands. I know I once installed lots of fonts, I dunno why, but I installed several hundred and it there were no signs of slowdown even on my rather slow laptop. Not sure when you would ever use all of those fonts tho.

I think that the principle is more "how many are being used" than "how many exist". Unlike some MS operating systems, Slackware (and other distributions) just builds a nice font cache which WILL take a long time if you have a lot of fonts. However, it's a *cache* for a reason (it improves performance) and it is *NOT* rebuilt until you say so (fc-cache).

Even then, it's more a matter of disk access when you first load a particular font, so loading up a program that wants to load every font will take longer but in general most programs do not do this (older versions of Word wanted to do this so that the font drop-down showed the font name in their own font... stupid idea).

Basically, until you get into the several thousand, or notice a slowdown, I wouldn't worry yourself. I'm more worried about the disk space that amount of fonts would take than anything else... but then I'm used to cutting down Slack to fit on EEEPC's and old laptops.

Thanks for the input all. I will only have no more than 300 fonts for what I will be doing so I should be good to go.

I can't imagine any problem with a few hundred. I'd say it's "too much" when you run out of disk space ... and even that might not stop you for long.

Well, it is actually rebuilt every boot, as per '/etc/rc.d/rc.M'

I believe I added the '&' to speed it up a bit.

Damn, I was digging around in my configs and I missed this one......Thanks!

It has the ampersand by default now.......

Yes many do by default, but some don't, I don't remember which.

The system in general is not slower if you have hundreds of fonts. It does make sense then though to run fc-cache only manually, because running automatically, this will take some time while booting. Also graphics and word processing programs at least check for, if not load, the present fonts upon startup.

Opening the font popdown menu in gimp or openoffice is also not very pleasant if you have hundreds of fonts. When I had a large amount of fonts on my box the last time (around 600 IIRC), I always forgot which font I was looking for while navigating through some hundred of others (but this can be highly inspiring at times :)).

All this is especially painful on older machines. Therefore and only therefore I try not to have too many fonts installed. Right now I have 147.

I found, through trial and error, that the bare-bones minimum fonts to get X up and running were: font-alias, font-bitstream-type1, font-cursor-misc, and font-misc-misc. To that I add dejavu-fonts-ttf because I use dejavu for just about everything, and some TTF fonts from my old windows98 system.

There are sure a LOT of fonts out there on slackware/x, a lot of international ones most people would never use, so I think it's a good idea to pare them down somewhat.

I once ran across an archive file with something like 6800 free fonts (can't recall whence on the net that I found it though). There was no slowdown on boot up. It was only starting programs like the GIMP and Scribus that took embarrassingly long (and I think OOo might have been rather slow in browsing the font menu.)